4 - D3: The Mighty Ducks

    The team gets scholarships for an exclusive private school.  They have to deal with the varsity team, fitting in with a prep academy crowd, and losing their normal coach.
    I saw this in theaters when it came out.  I also burned out on the first two Mighty Ducks movies.
    This is…. better than I remembered.  It still doesn't have the same level of heart as the first two.  But it's just as calculated as most Disney movies are.  In another way, I'm impressed with this effort.  It's simultaneously more juvenile, and more adult, than the other movies.
    To make it more juvenile, there's a lot more silliness.  There's a fun skating sequence to kick things off.  At one point, one of the kids actually jumps over a car that's driving at him.  There are plenty of pranks in this movie, and they range from good natured to being surprisingly sadistic.  Setting fire ants loose on sleeping victims is really cruel.
    But the overall message of the movie is strangely adult.  The kids need to grow up if they're going to get any better.  Their challengers aren't like the old teams.  The first team was just the rich kids.  The second team was a brutal foreign team.  This one is just the varsity team.  The movie makes a few efforts to make them into evil people, but they seem to be just upperclassmen.  By turning the real opposition in the movie into Charlie's unwillingness to let go of being a strictly offensive player, it's a surprisingly adult idea.  The new coach doesn't have much definition either.  They sell him as being a compassionate father.  But he doesn't seem to be much of a coach.
    This may be what made the movie do poorly, at least compared to the other movies in the franchise.  If kids can't quite identify with the themes, and adults feel like there's something too silly about it, no one leaves the theater feeling good.
    The one thing that I did learn, which I really liked, is that the female goalie is played by Marguerite Moreau, whom I thought was very cute - and found that she was the romantic interest in Wet Hot American Summer!  It's good to see she's still working!

     In looking around, I found this review of the movie, explaining how the Ducks are the villains.  While I don't agree to all of their points (in particular, the scholarships argument) they make a good case.